Comments: Creating an XP Pro VM for the free VMware Player

128 comments

Today, after re-reading the "How-to: VMware Player modification" post on the Hack a Day
site, I decided to give my creating a VM that works with the free VMware Player another
chance. The instructions given below are based on a post made by Rhys.

Comments

Is there a switch to make it boot and then run a linux distro CD
instead?

-Daniel

Posted by Daniel Lichterman at 07:25 GMT on 29 October 2005

Daniel,

If you insert your Linux distro CD instead of a Windows XP CD, and
the distro CD is bootable it should work.

You might want to set the guestOS option to "other24xlinux" for example (2.4.x
kernel). It is unclear to me how important this value actually is. Other values I
have seen so far: "SuSE", "Ubuntu", "Redhat", "otherlinux" using Google
site:vmware.com guestos linux.

Posted by John Bokma at 09:31 GMT on 29 October 2005

Any thoughts on how I can get the VM to see my DVD-ROM drive rather
than my CD-ROM drive? I want to try to install Vista.

Posted by rich at 13:34 GMT on 29 October 2005

Very good example. I made knoppix.vmx where
host=fc4
guest=knoppix 4.02 DVD edition
This is my configuration

I copied the name of the virtual disk name to the nvram setting, and changed
the extension to nvram. Same for the name of the configuration name, extension
vmx.

Note that the displayName is a cosmetic thing, you can use whatever you like.

Posted by John Bokma at 23:53 GMT on 29 October 2005

Is it normal for this to want to network-boot every time (and then
promptly fail)?
Followed instructions to the letter. Not working for me. :(

Posted by xb at 23:46 GMT on 30 October 2005

This shows I should be checking digg.com more frequently. I did
exactly what you documented over the weekend to create a sandbox for
application testing, and was pondering posting it somewhere. Thanks
for beating me to the punch! :-)

Posted by Moonbeam at 18:33 GMT on 31 October 2005

If you want your vmware machine to start in full-screen mode on start
up, add this to your vmx file:

gui.fullScreenAtPowerOn = "TRUE"

You can't switch it back to (true) fullscreen mode once you have it in
window(?) mode, however. This is probably a deliberate limitation of
the player.

Just to let you know : it's possible to boot directly from the CDs
under Linux (for me, it didn't work at first) :
comment out the line :

#ide1:0.autodetect = "TRUE"

Change the IDE file name to something like "/dev/cdrom" ... here you go
:)

Cheers

Posted by Egee_guy at 22:46 GMT on 2 November 2005

Hey I just thought I pass along something I did today.

Using the guide I created an 8 gig virtual drive.

I then added my pc's ghost image to my ISO image of MiniPE. Then in the
.vmx file created, I changed the following entries:

ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

to read

ide1:0.fileName = "c:\minipe.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

This would allow the virtual machine to boot the ISO image of MiniPE.

The only other thing I needed to do was to make sure that the boot
sequnce for the virtual machine was set to boot from the CDROM. This
is done by changing the virtual machine's BIOS.

Once these step where completed, I booted this image and restored the
ghosted image onto this virtual machine. Once installed, I rebooted
the virtual machine, and low and behold, my PC booted into the virtual
machine.

Posted by Nils Green at 07:18 GMT on 3 November 2005

For John.

I have the same problem.
It is because vmware don't find the right cdrom when it starts.
I use Daemon tools, and it found a DT virtual drive as cdrom.
I've invalidate drives in DT (set number of devices : disabled) and I
launched again vmware, and it detects one of my hardware cdrom, and
accept to boot from it....

I hope this will help you...

Posted by zootech at 20:52 GMT on 3 November 2005

I can't get the qemu-img.exe file to work in XP. It says its not a
"valid win32 program" I'm new to this and i probably am doing
something wrong. I went to the correct folder while in "CMD" and in
"command" and neither would work. I typed ""qemu-img.exe create -f
vmdk WindowsXPPro.vmdk 2G"" and then i typed ""qemu-img.exe"" just to
see what would happen and the same error code came up. I would
appreciate any response (except how stupid I am)

Posted by ernie at 17:29 GMT on 9 November 2005

I wonder what is the meaning of some of the configuration in the wmx
files.
In there any link where I can find this information?
For instance, what is MemAllowAutoScaleDown? Is this the option to let
vmware change memory allocation "on the fly"? If yes, why is it
disabled?

Posted by Usul at 11:35 GMT on 12 November 2005

What about VM Tools ... ?

Posted by Elyseo Mesquita at 21:23 GMT on 12 November 2005

I sucessfully load Windows XP installer, within vmware player, thanks
to this tutorial here, i just have one question I have not gone further
because the Windows Installer ask me to create a partition on my drive,
rigth now I only have linux on my drive and it gives me a non
partitionated space of 2047 MB in MBR (If i create a partition there,
am i going to screw up my MBR, i'm using FC4 and i'm a linux newbie
thanks in advance.

@Daniel: if you made a virtual disk (using qemu-img for example) then that's
where XP will be installed. Check if the disk space the installer sees is
indentical to the space of the virtual disk you created.

Posted by John Bokma at 01:25 GMT on 17 November 2005

Ohhh, ok now I get it, that's why we generated a blank 2 GB file with
qemu-img, so I guess if I wanted more space i should re run the
qemu-img and put the desired space. Thanks for everything i
successfully installed WXP and now running perfectly. Just another
questions, does vmware has good 3D support i'd like to run some games
but it runs kinda slow.

Posted by Daniel at 14:14 GMT on 17 November 2005

hey thanks man for this great tip! wow! this is free?!?! man i tried it
with my windows 98 CD and it worked like a charm! thanks!

I got qemu-img.exe is not a valid win32 app error. Re-download the file
from different sources, same issue. I ended up create the image using
the qemu-img in linux.

Posted by Arthur at 04:06 GMT on 22 November 2005

Can anybody help me with VMware virtual machines,I made a linux virtual
machine and I installed Whax on it (I mean on the virtual disk) and I
made that virtual disk bootable, but now I want to make some changes in
it I want to boot from the CD-ROM in that Virtual machine. Is there any
way?

Posted by Takk at 23:41 GMT on 1 December 2005

Does the virtual CD-ROM point to a real device? You can edit
this in the vmx configuration file.

ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

If it still doesn't boot from CD-ROM, but it recognizes the drive once
the virtual machine starts it might be that you have to turn booting on
in the BIOS of the virtual machine. Start the virtual machine, press Ctrl+G
(it now accepts input), press F2 and you should end up in the BIOS.

Select the Boot entry, which looks as follows on my machine:

VMware Player BIOS Boot menu

Hope this helps.

Posted by John Bokma at 23:57 GMT on 1 December 2005

I recently followed your tutorial using QEMU and VMWare player. I have
the VM up, and it starts to boot, but I am unable to install WinXP on
the VM. Whenever it boots, it gives me a "no bootable cd,
floppy...detected." I already put cd-rom at the top of the boot list,
saved my changes, and exited. I did the same for a bootable floppy,
but got the same error. I tried to boot a CD of Knoppix as well.
VMWare seems to accesses my cd/dvd drive as it starts up, so I don't
know what is going wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

Posted by Jason at 21:07 GMT on 9 December 2005

(Continues from previous post) I also disabled the cd-rom from my
actual OS, and in the VM it said to re-enable it when i tried to start
up. I re-enabled, but it still won't boot to it. What could be wrong?

Should I try to get the VM to look on my actual machine for an OS to
install? If so, how do I specify the folder where I copied Knoppix or
another OS?

Posted by Jason at 21:27 GMT on 9 December 2005

Jason, read the post by Nils Green, a bit more up. Just let ide1:0.fileName
point to an ISO image on the harddisk of your actual machine, and set
ide1:0.deviceType to "cdrom-image".

Posted by John Bokma at 04:24 GMT on 10 December 2005

Thanks for the great step-by-step. I've struggled with this for a while
now but finally sorted it thanks to your help.

Posted by timb at 16:27 GMT on 14 December 2005

How-to Boot from your regular cdrom drive.
Just point it to the drive letter of your cdrom player and make shore
there are nog conflicting lines in the rest of the file.

OK. I got Win 98 up and going after a few hiccups. Thank you VM
Builder. In any case, how do you change the display resolution and
colors? There are no options (The slider is frozen and you can pick
between 2 and 16 colours.) and apparently you cannot change the display
adapter. I want to put VMPlayer on my daughters computer to let her
play older games, but the video has to better than 640x480 with 16
colours. Any thoughts?

dio

Posted by dio at 03:04 GMT on 3 January 2006

@Dio. The easiest thing you probably can do is download the
evaluation version of VMware Workstation
and create the virtual machine using this program. It lets you install the VMware Tools
which as far as I know includes a better video driver.

Posted by John Bokma at 02:56 GMT on 4 January 2006

I have created a VM running XP Pro which runs fine. I want to know if
you or anyone installed any peripherals that work okay and if so, which
ones. Also it does not detect my DVD-ROM, FireWire Ports, Some USB
ports, and if I try to install the video drivers it errors out.

Posted by Techie at 21:40 GMT on 6 January 2006

I ghosted (norton) my laptop, then tried to restore the ghost on VMWare
image on a *different* laptop. the restore worked great, but XP won't
boot -- blue-screens at the beginning suggesting that a hardware change
has occurred. How can I get past this?

Posted by GGeter at 20:25 GMT on 11 January 2006

Have you tried safe mode?

Posted by John Bokma at 21:02 GMT on 11 January 2006

Yes, i have tried safe mode... same issue. i imagine if i try to run
the image on the laptop that i created the image from, it would work.
if that's the case, i'll just assume that you can't create an image of
a PC and expect it to work in VMware on a totally different machine.
is this correct logic?

Posted by ggeter at 02:33 GMT on 12 January 2006

Thanks for the great tutorial! Everything worked great, but, (you knew
there would be a but) after applying all of the updates (for win XP) I
am out of room. Is there some nice easy way to increase the size of
the virtual drive or do I have to start over?

Posted by Brian H at 04:07 GMT on 12 January 2006

Fantastic guide, thanks very much! I will be using this to test out
some other linux distros.

I'm not as experienced as most but I'm trying. Installed everything as
specified but I when I double click the vmx file I get the player opens
and I get the following message:

Cannot check for the existence of an old redo log for disk
'C:\VMDK folder\WindowsXPPro.vmdk'.

Failed to configure disk ide0:0. The virtual machine cannot be powered
on with an unconfigured disk.

Posted by aldago at 18:02 GMT on 19 January 2006

I was able to load vmware tools on XP by downloading the windows.iso
(found via google search), and adding the following lines to my vmx
file so that it adds the image as another cd-rom (secondary/slave):

Then I restarted vmware player, and the windows.iso file showed up as a
secondary cd-rom drive.

Next I browsed to the setup folder on the virtual cd and ran the
setup.exe file. Everything installed ok (clicked continue anyway on
the driver signing warnings) except for the video driver which reported
an error. I had to open device manager and force the video driver to
install using the video\winnt2k\vmx_svga.inf file. A few seconds after
the driver started installing, everything froze. I did a reset in
vmware player and the video driver must have installed just fine
because it shows up in device manager. Video is noticably more
responsive and the mouse can drag off the screen.

Posted by Brett at 00:00 GMT on 20 January 2006

How do I get networking to work?
I have no problem with "Browser Appliance" firefox after running the
program.
Following your instruction to create an XP Pro VM for the free VMware
Player, the WindowsXPPro runs fine but I could not connect to internet.
My ethernet card is: Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC in a
laptop PC.
Why it works with Firefox in Browser Appliance but not XPPro? Can
anyone help me?

Posted by MY Zen at 03:04 GMT on 21 January 2006

To run windows 2000 in the player, guestOS setting should be:

# type of guest OS
guestOS = "win2000pro"

and NOT "windows2000pro" as mentioned in an earlier post.

Posted by Jiri. at 23:42 GMT on 22 January 2006

Is it possible to setup VMWare application as Windows Service,
For Exmaple VMWare (that installed on Windows)starts on Windows boot
and runs Virtual machines

Posted by Michael at 15:58 GMT on 23 January 2006

any ideas on how to run VMware on a new machine with a new sata
hardrive so that it boots off an older ide hardrive both conected
inside? I just want to run two machines at the same time on one
platform. Both currently have windowsXPPro installed, I just can't
access the old harddrive pls help!

Posted by Osk at 02:05 GMT on 25 January 2006

i don't know if it's already commented, but it is possible to obtain
the vmware-tools by downloading the trial-version and searching the
archive for any iso's. et voila: you will find cd-images with
vmware-tools for all supported guest OS'

Is there any way to create XP on a scsi disk rather than IDE as above?
The idea being that I could then export it to an ESX host later down
the line?
Thanks,

Posted by AMcCreath at 13:21 GMT on 27 January 2006

I'm new to this so forgive me if I sound stupid. I just started to
create a Windows2kPro VM but got to a point in the installation where
paranoia took over and I backed off. The thing that stopped me was the
following message:

Setup has determined that your computer's startup hard disk is new or
has been erased, or that your computer is running an operating system
that is incompatible with Windows 2000.
If the hard disk is new or has been erased, or if you want to discard
its current contents, you can choose to continue setup.

I have installed many versions of windows many times and never seen a
comparable message so I was surprised. My gut feeling is that VMware
player can not actually re-format a hard drive or wipe out an existing
OS but I'd like to hear that from someone who has more experience with
this than I have. Is such a message as the one I received a normal
thing?

Thanks for any help.

If your computer is running an operating system that is incompatible
with Windows 2000, continuing setup may damage or destroy the existing
operating system.

Posted by Cecil at 13:21 GMT on 29 January 2006

Hello,

I'd installed a virtual machine with OS Suse Enterprise Server
9. Network works fine with DHCP IPs that vmware-config.pl generates. I
have problems when I want to configure static IPs for access to my
virtual machine.

How I can change IPs address for virtual networks? I'd tried to
change alls ips in configuration files but don't work.
Thanks and regards,
Rocio

Posted by Rocio at 11:58 GMT on 31 January 2006

Could someoone please tell me why the image created using qemu is so
small compared to the size of the sourrce ?

I have tried on a windows NT machine with a 2Gb boot partition and the
resultant image is aboutr 800kb !!!!!.

The image was a vmdk format.

Any ideas explanations are welcome and thanks in advance.

Posted by Nalu at 09:46 GMT on 1 February 2006

Thanks a lot for the help I got from your web page. I have successfully
installed XP Pro in VMWare Player. But I am now facinf one problem.
Even after installing the modem driver my modem is not detected by the
OS. How can it be solved ?

Posted by Pramod at 16:30 GMT on 2 February 2006

Hello I just installed Linux,Win 2003, And Win98 (older games) and I
have no problem all you have to do is look at your computers ram and
put less than that in the vmx code "memsize = "64"" to mem size
whatever. Since I have 2024Gb worth of ram 512 should do for running
all of the os's.
I use 2003 for network hosting, Linux just for the heck of it (win
user) and win98 because some of the old games need win98

Did you stop typing after the 2G? The Formating [sic] line should be
printed by the qemu-img program. It might be that if you type the Formating
line after it that the program chokes, and closes the command prompt.

Posted by John Bokma at 01:39 GMT on 3 February 2006

Cecil, that message is normal. To Windows 2000 the virtual disk you
created is new, and empty, and hence the warning.

Posted by John Bokma at 01:39 GMT on 3 February 2006

Nalu - the image is in a way compressed. Look again after the installation
of Windows XP. The image I am using is currently well over one gigabyte.

Posted by John Bokma at 01:39 GMT on 3 February 2006

Wanted to share what also is possible to do with this setup. Using the
same files and modifying the .vmx file slightly I was able to load
Windows 2003 Enterprise.

I don't know if that has been discussed before. I haven't found it, but
I may be blind...

My problem:
I'm able to beginn installation of XP in vmplayer under Ubuntu breezy,
choose a partition, and some files are copied into that partition.
Then, the system reboots, but apperently, it does not boot from
harddisk then, but again from the iso-file, trying to overwrite the
first part of the installation. The vmdk-file has grown up to some 400M
by then.

Id like to add that, as weird/surprising as it may sound, qemu doesn't
support vmdk completly -- or at least, it doesnt support formatting
capabilities. In other words, you can't create new empty vmdk files
using qemu for linux. The workaround for this is to get the Windows
port, and run it thru wine, like this:

wine qemu-img.exe create -f vmdk xp.vmdk 2G

(If it supposed to work flawlessly, i'm sorry. Maybe its due to the
precompiled qemu binaries for Ubuntu, after all :) )

Thank-you Chris for the link, it worked perfectly for creating my *.vmx
and *.vmdk files and gaining access to my cdroms, *.iso images and
other hardware...no muss, no fuss!

For the D.I.Y.'ers - Qemu has a new version 0.8.0 which doesn't require
an install and actually works to create the *.vmdk file in WinXP
sp2...0.7.2 wouldn't run right no matter where I downloaded it from!

Posted by bradds at 14:18 GMT on 14 March 2006

John, really a fantastic job with your detailed instructions, worked
for me very first try. One question please, I have a WinXp pro with
SP2. I followed your instructions, installed VMware Player, and then
Win XP Pro, even updated all the security patches. When I went to
install SP2 on the VMWare Player WinXP, it said it failed, not enough
disk. I have about 24G left available, is it the formulation of the
vmx file using the 2G parameter. How can I make it say 4 or 6 GB.

Again thank you very much.

Guy

Posted by Guy at 19:58 GMT on 25 March 2006

I'm another newbie. I am trying to create a XP Home environment within
an XP home environment as a test bed. Followed you XP Pro guide.
Install started, asked me to create a partition. Did that. Restarted,
started smartdrv and then the install bombed because setup couldn't
find enough disk space. I upped the 2G to 4G with the same result. I'm
baffled and don't have enough experience to try any other trouble
shooting. I did not have much luck with web searches so I thought you
might be able to help. Thanks in advance for your input.

JJ

Posted by JJ at 03:43 GMT on 1 April 2006

Having an issue with an XP VM running on an XP host- using "My Network
Places" I can browse the host machine from the virtual XP guest, and
transfer some files, but some types result in an "Access is Denied"
error. MP3's always get the error. What's weird is that some exe's
will consistently error out, while others transfer fine; doesn't seem
to be related to file size- transferred very large exe's OK, but some
small files consistently error out. Anybody else seeing the same
problem?

Posted by keylime48 at 05:00 GMT on 24 April 2006

the vm works great for me.
the only problem is how to have more space?
right now i have 2GB and it's not enough.
should i restart the process all over again or i could just set the
config ???

Posted by TRM at 17:34 GMT on 25 April 2006

is there any way to play 3D games ??
when i see the graphic adapter on the system of VM, it's not installed
yet.
so i try to install by using my graphic driver but apparently the
instalation is not connected to the VM.
what should i do then ?

Posted by Ray at 05:14 GMT on 26 April 2006

is there any way to play 3D games ??
when i see the graphic adapter on the system of VM, it's not installed
yet.
so i try to install by using my graphic driver but apparently the
instalation is not connected to the VM.
what should i do then ?

Posted by Ray at 05:32 GMT on 26 April 2006

Hii
The Information Provided Was Fablous and helped me a lot m very thank
full for it thankz a lot

Posted by Aashii at 23:38 GMT on 29 April 2006

This is a nice article, but I'm not sure if it is dated or what. I go
into detail on my blog about how to create a Windows VM the easy way
including the VMware Tools package which includes nice things like the
video drivers and a cool way to use your mouse and clipboard. No VM is
complete without VMware Tools if you have ever used the VMware
Workstation you know what I mean. BTW VMware Tools come with VMware
Workstation, but not with Player. Read more about it at

The process works well for me.
I ended up doing it twice, once for a 2Gb build, and again to get a
10Gb build.

It was no problem to set up printing, or install MS-Office, Nero, etc.

Thanks for a great post.

Posted by jxxl at 02:56 GMT on 11 May 2006

By the way, for testing, we have set up Apache on an instance of
WinXP, which is running on VMWare Player, which is running on Linux.
This has opened up a range of possibilities for us, when we set up test
scenarios - the possibliities are almost endless.

It is a pity that you can only have one instance of VMWare Player
running at once (according to their documentation) - looks like we will
need to purchase a copy of VMWare Workstation.

Posted by jxxl at 03:04 GMT on 11 May 2006

Hi,

I can install guest OS (WinXP Pro), everything look like okie but in
the guest OS the driver for video card is wrong (I can see it in device
manager). My guest OS have 256Mb of RAM. In guest OS, the screen is
very slow. I can't install the video card driver for my guest.

I can install guest OS (WinXP Pro), everything look like okie but in
the guest OS the driver for video card is wrong (I can see it in device
manager). My guest OS have 256Mb of RAM. In guest OS, the screen is
very slow. I can't install the video card driver for my guest.

I have working on WinXP (32 bit) professional in VMware player and I'm
unable install display drivers for the same. Kindly suggest me a
solution to install display drivers for both WinXP and Win2000
professional

Posted by sujay at 06:20 GMT on 6 June 2006

If you want the functionality of VMWare tools for an
unsupported OS this may help you:

This is a port to Minix of a utility that gives some
of the VMWare Tools functionality. C source is included, this can
probably be adapted to other OSs.

Posted by foxglove at 15:48 GMT on 20 June 2006

It's working great but the problem is the size.
how to increase the size from 2G to 4G or 10G ???

thanks in advance

Posted by webster at 09:12 GMT on 22 June 2006

Greetings Mr. Bokma:

I am interested in VMware as I play an online game called Ultima Online
that is about to institute anti-cheat software called PunkBuster.
PunkBuster has an unacceptable TOS (terms of service) which reserves
the right to inspect EVERY file on the hard drive.

I thought that if I could install a virtual machine on my box, I might
be able to install my game there and restrict PunkBuster's "domain."

I have followed your instructions at
http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2005/10/26/vmware-player-windows-xp.html,
but I keep getting the message "operating system not found."

You could make quite a name for yourself and become a sort of MMPORG
saint by enabling thousands of people to play this game without
sacrificing their privacy.

Thank you,

Marcus White
LAN Administrator
New Media & Extended Learning
University of New Mexico

Posted by Marcus White at 04:25 GMT on 25 June 2006

great how-to. thanks for for laying it out so simply.

Posted by treetop at 15:20 GMT on 4 July 2006

Hi,

I was wondering if you might be able to help me.
I've tried your guide to get XP Professional to load in VMWARE but
when i click on the WindowsXPPro.vx i get the following error:-

VMWARE PLAYER

File not found: WindowsXPPro.vmdk
This File is required to power on this virtual machine. Use VMware
Workstation to repair this virtual machine.

I would really appreciate your help

Regards

Tim

Posted by Tim at 09:37 GMT on 6 July 2006

Hi again

I have managed to install XP Professional on the VM Player but i am
unable to drag and drop or copy files from the host computer to the
guest.

Please can you help.

Posted by Tim at 11:15 GMT on 6 July 2006

I have a serial ata hard drive will this make any diference to the .vmx
file as i am having problems with ubuntu?

also i have an athlon 64 processor running Win Xp as the Host, can i
run the guest os as 64bit?

Cheers

Posted by Marcus at 19:55 GMT on 8 July 2006

I finally got my network running in my winXPHome VM (under Ubuntu 6.06
host os). It was not obvious that network type should be entered in the
vmxfile to get it to work.

Really good info. I have an app running under Linux that uses the
serial port(s). I assume that I can create the virtual machine,
renaming the WindowsXP... to Linux but any ideas if the serial ports
would need a separate line on the config file and what they need to be
?

Is there any way I can set the VMPlayer behaviour so that it is the
focus of input without having to press ctrl+G. Even my 6 year old
Athlon 1500+ is too fast for me to hit ctrl+g & F2 for going into bios
setup. May be age is catching up with me.

Is there any way the notwork booting option can be disabled or removed
entirely from the bios boot option.

Thanks.

Posted by Pradip Shah at 13:52 GMT on 2 September 2006

Hi,
Just something I'd like to add that I didn't see anywhere. When running
XP Pro in VM Player if you don't have a floppy drive but VM thinks
there is one it will come up with operating system not found. Also, I'd
like to know if there is any way to change the video card settings to
use the host system's video card. Thank you to anyone who helps out.

Posted by Kyle46 at 03:35 GMT on 15 September 2006

I've used Mr. Bokma's tutorial and also easy vmx. Plus vmware
workstation, to try and install winxp pro as a virtual machine. It all
seems to work well and the install starts, but I can't proceed beyond
the EULA acceptance as the f8 key won't activate to the next stage.
I've tried with my 3 perfectly legal xp pro disks, but always the same
result and the f8 key is fine as I've tested it; also I remember to use
the ctrl-g key.
Any idea as to what the problem could be.
My platform is XP Pro.
Thanks

Posted by John R at 22:34 GMT on 27 October 2006

I also got qemu-img.exe is not a valid win32 application, which
prevents me from following the rest of the instructions. Any idea as
to a potential solution? Googling leads me in circles.

Any way of resizing a VMware virtual disk? - I set mine to 4GB which at
the moment is enough, but once I start installing stuff on it I'm in
trouble.

It took a long time to create the VMware image so I'd prefer to resize
the virtual disk if possible rather than re-create another entire
image.

Any ideas??

Posted by Turboz at 19:03 GMT on 8 January 2007

i have no cd from xp, where can i download an vmx file for xp?

Posted by lemeip at 19:59 GMT on 18 January 2007

@lemeip - Microsoft makes a version of Windows XP available with
Internet Explorer 6 for testing. It works with Microsoft's virtual
machine. I have no idea how easy their image can be converted
to the VMware player (I gave it a try some time ago, but my
first attempts didn't work so I gave up.).

The image has a time limit though.

Posted by John Bokma at 21:00 GMT on 19 January 2007

hi to all please help me with this vmware i`m new to this software i
created the needed vmdk file, vmx file to config it. I`m using windows
XP but when i start the vmware software i give the config file after
that i get this message that the it "FAILED TO CONFIG DISK ide0:0. THE
VIRTUAL MACHINE CANNOTBE POWER ON WITH A UNCONFIGURED DISK".

plz help me i need to work on it.

plzzz

Posted by karthik at 03:24 GMT on 26 January 2007

aving an issue with an XP VM running on an XP host- using "My Network
Places" I can browse the host machine from the virtual XP guest, and
transfer some files, but some types result in an "Access is Denied"
error. MP3's always get the error. What's weird is that some exe's will
consistently error out, while others transfer fine; doesn't seem to be
related to file size- transferred very large exe's OK, but some small
files consistently error out. Anybody else seeing the same problem?

Is there any way to make a windows 98 Vm? Note: i will be using it on a
linux OS.

Posted by Alex Antonas at 22:59 GMT on 10 February 2007

Thank you very much, very very helpful, nice to no someone cares about
others and is willing to share information...

Posted by Ridgway at 18:36 GMT on 14 February 2007

Hey i wanted to know if it is possible to have the virtual pc run off
the physical video card? this would take a load off my processor and
allow me to run more virtual pc's smoothly with no freezing and games
would beable to run much more smoothlly also. any help would be greatly
appreciated

Posted by Ryan at 01:27 GMT on 18 February 2007

after install windows xp pro on vm player..it didn`t detect the
pendrive which is using usb port.help me.

Posted by erudition at 08:22 GMT on 26 February 2007

I was wondering if you might be able to help me. I've tried your guide
to get XP Professional to load in VMWARE but when i click on the
WindowsXPPro.vx i get the following error:-

VMWARE PLAYER

File not found: WindowsXPPro.vmdk This File is required to power on
this virtual machine. Use VMware Workstation to repair this virtual
machine.

I currently dual boot between Windows XP and Suse 10. Is there a way
to set up a virtual device to point from one to the other? I don't
want to clone the other operating system, I want to run it and have all
changes saved back to the hard disk. I can find tons of info on
cloning one or the other OS, but nothing on keeping the current
install.

Posted by Andy Lopez at 14:08 GMT on 21 March 2007

It seems that in order to get the CD-ROM drive to work in Fedora Core 6
with the 2.6.20-1.2925.fc6 kernel and VMWare 1.0.3 build-34682, the
drive filename should be either:

/dev/cdrom

or

/dev/hdc

Where hdc is the specific address of the drive. Thanks again for the
tutorial.

Posted by Zero456 at 22:41 GMT on 22 March 2007

Thanks for the helpful post. I'm setting up one right now. Being new to
VMWare, I almost installed Windows XP on my real computer instead of
installing it under VMWare. It was easy to cancel though.

I've not found a way of resizing a vmware disk but you can create a new
one with qemu-img.exe (ide only i think, you can download blank scsi
disks from the web), I then used g4u on a boot cd to copy the drive
image from the small to large drive, then booted with knoppix and used
qtparted+ntfsresize to make ntfs fill the drive.

I set up a VM to run WinXP and legacy software within Mandriva 2007
Spring.

I ran the vmware-config.pl first and configured two virtual ethernet
connections (I answered yes to all the default options).

I used the EasyVMX site to create the basic files and then installed
WinXP without incident in about 30 minutes. A lot faster than when I
installed it for real several years ago!

Everything worked fine except that WinXP wouldn't connect to the
internet. What finally worked for me was to change the ethernet setting
from "es1000" to "vlance" in the vmx file. Then it worked perfectly.
The "nat" option worked and I didn't need to try changing it to
"bridged".

I hope this is helpful.

Posted by Ted at 08:05 GMT on 11 August 2007

I can't seem to get VMware player to find the cd rom drive, or any .iso
image I direct it to. I've used the "default" .vmx configuration as
written in the tuitorial, and have used the boot settings that were
show in one of the above comments. I've also tried everyone's different
suggestions for changing the .vmx configuration, but vmware player
never loads it, and alway's tries to load from an "A:\" drive, even
though I have no A: drive anywhere. The hard drive that my .iso is on
is the C: drive and my cd drive is drive E:. I don't get why it always
goes to the A: drive. It loads to it like it would load something from
the A: drive (that's not there) but doesn't do anything, just sits
there. I can type things after it, so I tried typing c:\windows.iso and
it says that it is an invalid directory. I'm running windows vista and
am trying to load windows xp pro sp2. Any ideas?

Posted by Frank at 01:00 GMT on 10 October 2007

You rock! I have been reading up on VMs and wanted to give it a try but
didn't know where to start. Did a google, found your instructions, and
in less than 1 hour had a vm machine up and running on our LAN. Our
DHCP server and domain controller both see the box as a machine on the
LAN, like it really exists. Sweet, and easy to do thanks to your
instructions.

Thanks again for the great tip!

Posted by TCGunn at 23:53 GMT on 23 October 2007

@dio:
You just need to, in XP, check the "Run in compatibility mode for..."
check box and select "Win 98" or whatever.

Remember to disable virtual drives like Deamon Tools and such (or it
won't find the Cd).

Thanx for sharing :)

Posted by SR at 01:41 GMT on 22 November 2007

Superstar, i have used this guide so many times, and thanks to it, have
learned how to install pritty much anything that will boot from a CD,
to such an extent i can run just about every windows and linux OS i can
lay my hands on

:)

sweet thanks John

Posted by Monaro800 at 08:48 GMT on 6 December 2007

"Remember to disable virtual drives like Deamon Tools and such (or it
won't find the Cd)."

ARGH! Thanks SR. I was pulling my hair out trying to figure that one
out. It works a treat now! :)

Posted by Lichbane at 03:10 GMT on 25 December 2007

I followed your tutorial and now have XP Pro working in the Free
player. Unfortunately the player locks up intermitently. Like every ten
seconds or so i get about 5 seconds of access! Then it locks up
again... and so it goes! I have tried making adjustments to memory
allocation to no effect. Host machine is XP Pro, Intel core2 2.4GH with
2 gig ram. The host is networked. The free Linux Browser application
works no problem. Many many Thanks in advance.

Posted by Chris M at 10:23 GMT on 27 December 2007

Hello, I'm having a couple problems.

I'm trying to get diablo 2 working through the vmware, I've got windows
xp as my native system. The problem I run into is a cd error which
doesn't seem to bother the system when i'm loading diablo 2, and a
direct draw error, I'm assuming the direct draw error is because the
video drivers on the native vmware install of windows xp aren't very
good. How do you update them? I'll check a couple other sources and
check back here every once in awhile.

Thanks.

Posted by Darkelru at 13:01 GMT on 29 December 2007

Hi, I have problem with my modem driver any op sys i install on vwware
modem driver is not in device manager

Posted by tai at 23:36 GMT on 21 January 2008

Sorry for my english...

Is it necessessary to change the vmx-file in any way if I want to use a
vmdk-file with bigger size?
I managed to install XP in the 2 GB vmdk. But every time I use a bigger
one, I get messages by the vmplayer:
VMware Workstation cannot open one of the virtual disks needed by this
VM because it is larger than the maximum file size supported by the
host file system. Some remote file systems do not support files larger
than 2 GB, even though the file system on the server might.
Cannot open the disk 'E:\VMs\WindowsXPPro.vmdk' or one of the snapshot
disks it depends on.
Reason: The file is too large.

Any ideas?

Posted by nasuta at 16:54 GMT on 1 March 2008

Hi nasuta,

It sounds like your drive E is formatted as FAT16 which has a file size limit of 2 GB.
Notice that the VMware player complains about the host file system, which is drive E.

The solution is to either format the drive as FAT32 (max 4GB - 1), or better,
use NTFS.

Posted by John Bokma at 00:21 GMT on 2 March 2008

Very helpful website and posts. Really glad I landed on this.

Posted by Anon1 at 02:51 GMT on 19 May 2008

If you cannot get F8 to work at the EULA of Win XP, make sure the "F
Lock" key is on and it should work then.

Posted by StereoDevil at 00:05 GMT on 3 August 2008

man this idea is awesome, but like some users i also get the . .

'C:\Program' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

@zeke: For clarity, I included in the article also the prompt.
You accidentally copied this prompt, causing the above error.

I've added a note regarding this to the article, thanks
for letting me know.

Posted by John Bokma at 23:43 GMT on 7 August 2008

Thanks guys! After searching and searching, I ended up here and by
ready all the comments, all of my questions got answered and I finally
got my virtual image working with windows XP PRO. THANKS!!

Posted by RooRoo at 17:22 GMT on 23 August 2008

I'm using VMWare for the first time and using Ubuntu to launch the
forensics Virtual Machine to boot up within the VMWare Player. How do I
go about it using the command line in VMWare

Posted by Anonymous at 12:35 GMT on 25 November 2008

I'm assuming the direct draw error is because the video drivers on the
native vmware install of windows xp aren't very good. How do you update
them? I'll check a couple other sources and check back here every once
in awhile.

I have created a VMX image of my running XP and i installed VISTA as my
primary OS. Now i wanna be able to run XP on vmware as i use to be able
to before but i am unable to install VMWARE TOOl. What is the problem
associating with it? How can i fix this? When i do install vmare tool,
nothing happens and i am kind of getting strechy about that now, please
help!

Posted by Asad at 01:38 GMT on 12 December 2008

Since 2 years after the last post... 2011 found this article, and still
very handy! Clear and worked perfect! Thanks

Posted by Marcel at 19:54 GMT on 14 April 2011

FYI: New FREE vmware player can create VMX image

Posted by baldy at 06:26 GMT on 5 July 2011

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